Building the content on curiosity

Did you ever overhear the conversation in a bus, or any other public transportation unit that the people are talking about science? It does not necessarily have to be some specific scientific topic but you probably heard them using scientific terms and mentioning the topics. In recent times the viruses, pandemic, epidemiology, vaccination and things connected with ongoing Sars-Cov-2 pandemic became the theme to speak about. If you think about it more carefully you should notice the words such as temperature, weather forecast, cholesterol, fat, acid, DNA, GMO, speed, pressure often appear. It does not mean that people on the bus can differentiate speed from velocity nor do they know that cholesterol is neither lipid or protein but lipoprotein. They do not know what equations rule their cell phones and how C. Shannon in 1949 while exploring the information theory derived the equation which enabled the internet.

How to make communications faster and take up less space on a hard disk, making the internet possible

They will talk about internet connection, Wi-Fi, signal strength regardless of their knowledge of its functionality. People tend to talk about science or scientific topics if they find those topics relevant for their lives. In order to find relevance our task as a teacher should be to play with their natural born curiosities and place them in their personal context. Our Croatian partner from Science factory made a video about heat and temperature using those kinds of approaches at the beginning of the video. By asking a variety of questions with which students can relate to the video is slowly building on curiosity and constructing the backscene to place the scientific topics in everyday context. From greeting people with a regular, not so normal anymore, handshake Bojan is explaining the heat transfers and differences between heat and temperature. Turn on the subtitles and enjoy the heat ride with his video. Notice how this curiosity is slowly being built up from everyday experience to more open ended questions.

🥄Why is it SPOON compatible?
Because it is a partner’s questioning of its own practices, disrupted by the pandemic and distance learning. By exploring different ways of sharing the key messages behind the project how science teaching is not only about the content.


You may also like...

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search